Ruthless is a mistake and will likely kill the game

I don't think it will kill the game, I do not like that it will probably thin the standard-challenge-league population slightly which will reduce the amount of items on the market to browse but not likely enough to cause serious problems.

It also helps that there is still currently no valid competition for this game so until that happens I'm not sure it can die not even mentioning the sister version which i'd love to hear how this news was received on that side if this is going into that version.

I think people misunderstand the intent of Ruthless. While it is true that a lot of QOL things are removed, it actually does fix a core issue with POE that GGG refuses to fix correctly.
By making Rares and Uniques extremely rare in Ruthless, it makes them worth more to the player, all game long, or at least far far into the game. The same can't be said of rares currently, where their usefulness drops off around Yellow Maps, if not earlier. The other solution, to that, of course, is to make rares scale with mapping and have them drop with those influenced/crafted mods that are so useful but don't seem to drop naturally. However, GGG doesn't seem to want to do that, so Ruthless it is.

It won't kill the game but it will also not attract many new players.

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Pashid wrote:

Hope you realize that ruthless has nothing todo with the base game.

Untrue.

GGG has limited resources (#people, time, money), and there are too many things that need fixed (eg Rare monsters, drops, game performance, new broken skills, buggy league starts, and umm CRAFTING?) and distractions that aren't fixing problems are a mistake.

EDIT: IMHO the devs should be daydreaming of fixing issues that impact the bottom line of their business, and not daydreaming of some side project that doesn't come close to an 80/20 rule.

And if Ruthless is a portent of what drops will be like in PoE 2.0, ugh....

And I hope you realize that the team behind Ruthless are developers working without being paid as their personal pet project... You owe them respect for working for free on this.